Just did this today.I'm pleased with how this turned out. I'm glad I stayed with it!

Here's a lil cuban frog I did today. It took me around 3.5 hours to do. It's a study I did from a reference.

This is my painted version of Bill Pressing's awesome work. Just heard of this amazing artist from Bobby Chiu's ChiuStream interview with the artists. I am instantly a fan.

Happiness is anything that is loved by you
This is my tribute to Chiquita, my 7 year old-mini Daschund who lost her battle to ovarian cancer on December 17, 2010.The stuff she's chasing are actually all her favorite things while she was still with me. I'd like to remember her this way, a happy pup, running about in dog heaven.

My last assignment was about colorizing from a rough sketch provided. For this last piece, I tried to incorporate bits of what I had learned from the previous lessons. I'm pretty satisfied with this. It's an awesome course, I learned so much more than I did in a year's time back in school, but learning never stops. Keep on movin! I plan to join sketch competitions and knock out some of my own for critiquing while I save up and take on another course in Schoolism.com

This lesson was about Vectors. I shunned the idea of it since vectors can have a mind of their own. Bobby clearly explained how to tame this tiger of a technique and now it's as easy as 123.

This was about painting hair without pulling out your own in the process.

This lesson was about smudging to create a much smoother transition yet still retaining a painterly feel to your finished piece.

This was about adding texture to your existing painting. It's a series of adjusting and blending, but it gives another level of depth to your starting piece.

This lesson was about painting with customized brushes to make your digital art work seem like it was done traditionally. Great technique and process!

This lesson was about colorizing from black and white.

This first lesson was about visualizing from darkness. You must have a good stock knowledge of shapes and form, otherwise nothing will come out of a black piece of canvas.

An attempt to paint a scantily clad woman

DAY 9: JELLYFISH

DAY 8: RIBBIT?

This guy took me quite some time to finish. I wanted to make sure that my clean up was improving. It may have taken me around 2 days to post this, although, I'm thinking of maybe posting every other day so I don't rush it.
 

DAY 7: WHITE FANG

DAY 6: CREATURE

 

Yesterday was one of those days. No matter what I did, I just couldn't get anything done. I had gone through 4 different concepts that got me bogged down and exasperated. After a night's sleep with a refreshed perspective, I had finally nailed down my second attempt to paint without copying. I did however use a reference of a tadpole for inspiration. This took me 2.5 hours to finish.

DAY 5: SPIKE

This is my first attempt to digitally paint a concept, design and lighting on my own. The challenges I encountered were changing everything midway since I felt everything needed to be pushed more. Because of that, I had to rework areas, erasing and painting over lights and shadows over and over again. It got a bit frustrating since I lost count how many hours I spent on this. I feel I may have bitten more than I could chew with this one. However, I'm quite satisfied with the result. On to my next one!

DAY 4: NO SWIMMING

I was thinking of subjects that would be good to practice painting on, and my thoughts went to one of my favorite artists of all time, Norman Rockwell. Knowing that I had to make one painting a day, and that painting something of his style would take way way longer than painting a finger, I decided to give it a try. It would be a good way to study how Norman Rockwell painted this boy and what he considered when rendering the piece. I particularly liked how he described the structure of the face through light and shadow. It's true that once you start painting (and not just merely observing) you get to see first hand what the artist did in order to explain certain forms in terms of how much paint he needed to use to bring out the bulge on the forehead, the subtle hint of the scapula at the back, the knee bone, how hard edges must be to show the glistening of wet hair etc. The wrinkles on the clothes were challenging, since your eyes just get lost in all the swirls and zig zags of the texture. At that point, I just told myself, if it looks like cloth, that's good enough for me. This took a total of 5 hours to paint and another 2.5 hours to clean up. Although it took a while, I'm pretty pleased at how it turned out, I was able to put the method to another test drive, making this complex piece, possible to paint in less time than I would prior to this class.